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tragedy. Anna and Johann Kaufmann’s baby, Peter, died before the City of Chester reached America. For a group as tight-knit and community-minded as the Schweizers, the loss of one child was a loss to all. Anna’s father gathered his congregation into a quiet corner of the steerage quarters and led them in prayer for the eternal life of his unbaptized infant grandson. Johann Schrag may well have chosen a text from Revela-tions, his favorite book of the Bible, to weave into the prayer service.
    A pious and austere man, even by Mennonite standards, Schrag was quick to see dire signs and portents in the tragedies of life. When the prayers were ended and the last hymn sung, the small body was taken up to the deck and consigned to the Atlantic Ocean.
    It was some comfort to Anna to have her entire family on board the ship with her—her four brothers and their wives and children, her two unmarried younger sisters. And there was her three-year-old son, Johann, to look after. After seven years of marriage, after the births of three sons, Johann was all Anna and her husband had left. One small child to bring with them into the unknown reaches of the New World.

    The City of Chester arrived in New York Harbor on August 24, 1874, anchoring just off the Battery. A vigorous cold front had pushed through the previous night, dropping temperatures from the mid-80s to the upper 60s and clearing the rank city air. The families gathered on deck to look across the dark water at a city of cobblestone and brick and steep pitched roofs, a hodgepodge of three-and four-story buildings and narrow streets jammed with horses and carts. From the waterfront in those days you could still see the spire of Trinity Church jutting above the rooftops and the granite towers that would soon be strung with the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. White sails and gray columns of steamer smoke rippled on the water, and the crowded buildings loomed at the water’s edge with that ineffable sense of infinite possibility peculiar to New York harbor. Since the City of Chester was too big to tie up at one of the wharves that radiated out of the Battery, the ship remained in the deeper water offshore while a smaller boat ferried the passengers and their baggage across.
    Family by family, the Kaufmanns and their neighbors from Waldheim and Horodischa—the Albrechts, Grabers, Schrags, Blocks, Gerings, Preheims—marched down the wharf and directly into the low-domed circular building known as Castle Garden.
    This curious structure, neither a castle nor a garden, was an early example of creative urban recycling. Built between 1808 and 1811 to fortify the southern tip of Manhattan (hence the name Battery), Castle Garden was reborn as a summer restaurant in 1824; then in the 1840s it was roofed over and converted into an opera house and theater (Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, sang there for an audience of four thousand); and finally, in 1855, it became the nation’s primary immigrant processing center. Over the next thirty-four years, more than eight million immigrants passed through these thick red granite walls on their way to new lives in America.
    To the Schweizers, the scene inside Castle Garden looked like pandemonium and sounded like Babel. Immigrants in their heavy woolen clothes filled the rows of benches on the lower level. Overhead hung two tiers of balconies where families who had arrived earlier camped while awaiting clearance. Children shouted and babies squalled. The smell of cheese, rolls, and coffee drifted in from the humid kitchens. Red-faced officials tried vainly to contain and channel the human flood. At the center of the great theatrical rotunda capped by a glass dome stood a dozen representatives of the leading railroads accosting the newcomers with offers of every kind—cheap land out West, easy transportation, temporary lodging while they looked around. A few paces away, an immigration official standing on a kind of rostrum shouted instructions